Tim West

Tim West is an American briar pipe maker working in Columbus, Ohio. He made his first pipe in 1967 and began earning his living from the craft after 1975. A self-taught artisan, he has worked alone for half a century. J. H. Lowe & Co., a pipe-repair parts firm founded in Brooklyn in 1947, is also now part of his company, Tim West, Inc., and is run out of Columbus.

Workshop and Method

Production runs entirely by his own hand in a basement workshop at his home. Power tools are used for drilling, shaping, sanding, and polishing, but every stage is set up and guided manually; the workshop's scale is closer to a one-person bench than a factory. Annual output was reported at around fifteen hundred pieces in the mid-1990s, dropping to twelve hundred in later records.

He favors Grecian briar for the wood. No oil or similar curing method is applied; the block is dried naturally only. Sources give drying times ranging anywhere from one to five years, so no single figure is stated here. Staining uses alcohol-based aniline dyes, with natural, walnut, and dark walnut as the base tones, finished with a carnauba wax coat. Stems are made of lucite and vulcanite. Records indicate sandblasting was not used in the early period, with fine needlepoint carving applied to some pipes instead; sandblasted examples appear in later records as well. The pipes with the cleanest grain are set aside under the name "Best of the West."